follow up from Pat's post, below

by Jay, San Diego, Wednesday, November 30, 2011, 15:58

Under "mistakes were made", Pat wrote:

* Too many mistakes on offense.

While the overall M.O.E. dropped this year slightly (12.3% to 11.1%), there just wasn't a crispness on offense that I sort of expected with a mostly veteran cast returning. We averaged an entire penalty a game more on offense, and far too many of those were costly false starts (I want to see how many happened on 1st down, which can really kill a drive before it starts).

But even beyond the kind of things that get scooped up by M.O.E., things just looked too sloppy. How often did we narrowly avoid a delay of game penalty or have to call a timeout to avoid one? How many miscommunications between QB and WR on routes?

What perhaps made it even worse in my mind is how we seemed to get rattled in big games. The M.O.E. for the Stanford game was essentially the highest in the Kelly era. 1 offensive mistake for every 5 plays. Kelly always talks about "you know we're going to get their best effort because this is their biggest game of the year". Why don't we seem to be giving our best effort for our big games rather than against Purdue or Air Force?